The first televised interview with Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and her vp pick, Tim Walz, drew a sizable audience for CNN Thursday night.
The 45-minute interview with CNN anchor Dana Bash drew just under 6 million viewers (5.99 million, to be precise), based on fast national ratings from Nielsen. That number will likely go up a bit when final national ratings, which include out of home viewing, are released later today.
The nearly 6 million viewers is CNN’s best performance in the 9 p.m. ET hour since more than 9.5 million people tuned in for the June 27 debate between President Joe Biden and Republican nominee Donald Trump. Biden’s performance in that debate, and the fallout from it, helped lead to his decision not to seek re-election and endorse Vice President Harris to lead the ticket; she officially became the Democratic nominee earlier this month.
Excluding the debate, the Harris-Walz interview drew CNN’s biggest audience in the hour since the night of Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2021. It outdrew the combined totals for rivals Fox News (2.58 million viewers) and MSNBC (1.31 million) at 9 p.m. on Thursday.
The CNN special, which aired a week after the close of the Democratic National Convention, came after several days of a media-driven narrative that Harris ought to sit for interviews with national media outlets. She discussed some of her plans for helping middle-class Americans and brushed aside some of Trump’s barbs at her, calling them the “same old, tired playbook.”